Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West by E Cram (review)

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• Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West by E Cram
• Christine Self

E Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. Oakland: U of California P, 2022. 292 pp. Hardcover, $85; paperback and e-book, $34.95.

The opening to E Cram's Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West asks its central question: "What does it mean to route 'sexuality' through modernity's relationship to energy?" (1). In exploring this question, Cram argues that queer studies must include energy in theorizing on sexual modernity, due to energy's centrality in the relationship between humans and land/environment, manifested in how extraction of energy from the land enervates, or exhausts, marginalized peoples while offering innervation, or revitalization, to the dominant. Violent Inheritance builds on previous scholarship surrounding vitality and its use in discourses on racial and sexual degeneracy. Using the concept of "land lines," or connections between energy regimes, sexuality, and the land and contested memories of the North American West as a key term for the book, Cram adds new dimensions to queer studies, queer ecological criticism, and the energy and environmental humanities.

The book includes an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. After laying a solid foundation for understanding the key terms and concepts of the study in the introduction, Cram shares, in the body of the book, the results of archival inquiry, participant observation, and personal interviews taking place in key areas of the North American West. Chapter one opens with writer Owen Wister's account of attending the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and [End Page 280] his drawing masculine energy from the manufactured Western exhibit called "Wooded Island" with its rustic and manly "Hunter's Cabin." Cram presents Wister's accounts as those of settler movement from the urban East to the untamed West in search of land from which to extract vitality.

Also set in the past, chapter two investigates settler feminist Grace Raymond Hebard's map- and myth-making in Wyoming by examining the archival collection of her papers, artifacts, and ephemera collected at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Cram posits the foci of Hebard's writing, Sacajawea as an "Indian Princess" and eugenics, represent the production of a national vitality, where heredity and racial homogenization energize whiteness while consuming Indigeneity.

Cram uses present-day personal observations of visiting significant sites in chapters three and four. These sites include the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and its contested exhibits focusing on Canada's residential and industrial schools as well as Idaho's Minidoka National Historic Site preserving the ruins and lands of a Japanese American detention facility. These places, sites of racial and sexual violence, force visitors to witness the violent inheritance of the settler practice of stealing Indigenous children from their families and confining Japanese Americans in service of white supremacy. Cram offers the two sites of exhibited land use to show spaces of settler colonial confinement and sexual violence by the state to establish new understandings of sexual modernity as tied to land resources and energy. In the closing chapter of the book, titled "Petrocultures and Intimate Atmospheres," Cram shares personal interviews conducted in the Rocky Mountain West along Interstate 80, drawing connections between petroculture, queer mobility, and imagined communities that would embrace queer identity.

The spaces and places Cram takes readers to in Violent Inheritance make it read like a travelog of the North American West with a laser focus on contested histories and energy regimes. In moving from place to place and from past to present, Cram encourages the reader to contextualize those connections by providing compelling examples of sites in the North American West that are inseparable [End Page 281] from the energy regimes that have overtaken them and the people who lived and continue to live there, even affecting the most intimate parts of their lives.

Cram is also effective in using a variety of methods (interviews, observations, archival research) in making a convincing case that the consideration of energy belongs in queer studies due to its crucial place in between the land...